I have spent a
couple days trying to install DBD-Oracle-1.16 (all required stuff, such as GCC,
DBI, etc has been installed before ) on Sun-Fire v240 running Sparc
Solaris 9 with the Oracle 9.2.0.1.0 client installed. The installation
takes a couple minutes ONLY after you spend days trying to make it
workable.

I wrote the log of
what I do, in order to do not waste my time in future. I am pretty sure that
this log will be very useful for people installing DBD-Oracle on Solaris. Log
is written very detailed (step-by-step) with highlighted typical mistakes.

Step 1: In order
to install "DBD-Oracle-1.16" you need to download it, set all
appropriate environment variables (see readme for details) and
run <<perl Makefile.PL>>.

I got an error
that is mostly typical for Solaris installation:

//
************************ Error 1 ***********************/

....Found header files in
rdbms/demo.

*********************************************************I can't find
the header files I need in your Oracle installation.You probably need to
install some more Oracle components.I'll keep going, but the compile will
probably fail.See README.clients for more
information.*********************************************************

So, as another set
on Google' posts showed that it is a possibility of missing libraries
compiled with 64 bits and same libraries compiled with 32 bits suppoert. As I
understood, all components of installation, such as Oracle client,
Perl, GCC should support only one type of libraries, either 32 or 64 bits.
I found that having all as 32 bits is easier to me than recompile perl, gcc as
64 (may be I am wrong in this assumption). In order to have all of
them as 32 bits, I changed lib to lib32 in Manifest file (not
Manifest.PL).

You
should replace the following lines in the "MakeMaker const_loadlibs
section":

Step 5: This is actually it, and you do not need to do anything else.
But investigating different errors during the various steps, I found the
very simple "independent sanity" testdbi perl script written
by Jeff Hunter. This script is not related to
standard process of making/buildin/testing/installation. It
just verifies that you can access DB and run
a couple queries against it. The code itself,
testdbi.pl can be found at http://www.idevelopment.info/data/Oracle/DBA_tips/Programming/PROGRAMMING_2.shtml